| 2026 | Winner | The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North | Michelle Adams | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2025 | Winner | Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis | Jonathan Blitzer | Penguin Press |
| 2024 | Winner | Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights | Samuel G. Freedman | Oxford University Press |
| 2023 | Winner | By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners | Margaret A. Burnham | W. W. Norton |
| 2022 | Co-winner | Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America | Eyal Press | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2022 | Co-winner | How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America | Clint Smith | Little, Brown |
| 2021 | Co-winner | Reaganland: America’s Right Turn (1976-1980) | Rick Perlstein | Simon & Schuster |
| 2021 | Co-winner | The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes | Zachary D. Carter | Random House |
| 2020 | Winner | No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us | Rachel Louise Snyder | Bloomsbury |
| 2019 | Winner | The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy | Anna Clark | Metropolitan Books |
| 2018 | Winner | The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America | Richard Rothstein | Liveright |
| 2017 | Winner | Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City | Matthew Desmond | Crown |
| 2016 | Winner | $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America | Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 2015 | Winner | The Half Has Never Been Told | Edward E. Baptist | Basic Books |
| 2014 | Winner | Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time | Ira Katznelson | Liveright |
| 2013 | Winner | The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table | Tracie McMillan | Scribner |
| 2012 | Winner | Trampling Out the Vintage | Frank Bardacke | Verso Books |
| 2011 | Winner | The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration | Isabel Wilkerson | Random House |
| 2010 | Winner | Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town | Nick Reding | Bloomsbury |
| 2009 | Winner | The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals | Jane Mayer | Doubleday |
| 2008 | Winner | The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity | Robert Kuttner | Knopf |
| 2007 | Winner | Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq | Thomas E. Ricks | Penguin Books |
| 2005 | Winner | American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare | Jason DeParle | Viking |
| 2004 | Winner | Triangle | David Von Drehle | Grove Atlantic |
| 2003 | Winner | The Great Tax Wars | Steven R. Weisman | Simon & Schuster |
| 2002 | Winner | Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution | Diane McWhorter | Simon & Schuster |
| 2001 | Winner | Striking Steel | Jack Metzgar | Temple University Press |
| 2000 | Winner | No Shame in my Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City | Katherine S. Newman | Russell Sage Foundation |
| 1999 | Winner | Pillar of Fire | Taylor Branch | Simon & Schuster |
| 1998 | Winner | Everything for Sale | Robert Kuttner | Knopf |
| 1997 | Winner | When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor | William Julius Wilson | Knopf |
| 1996 | Co-winner | All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence | Fox Butterfield | Knopf |
| 1996 | Co-winner | The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit - Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (Distinguished Honorable Mention) | Nelson Lichtenstein | Basic Books |
| 1995 | Winner | City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College | James Traub | Perseus Books |
| 1994 | Co-winner | Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism | William Chafe | Basic Books |
| 1994 | Co-winner | Thinking for a Living: Education and the Wealth of Nations | Ray Marshall, Marc Tucker | Basic Books |
| 1992 | Winner | The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America | Nicholas Lemann | Knopf |
| 1991 | Winner | The Burning Season: The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest | Andrew Revkin | Houghton Mifflin |
| 1990 | Winner | From Beirut to Jerusalem | Thomas L. Friedman | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1989 | Winner | A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam | Neil Sheehan | Random House |
| 1988 | Winner | Waltzing With a Dictator | Raymond Bonner | Times Books |
| 1987 | Winner | Blundering Into Disaster | Robert S. McNamara | Pantheon |
| 1986 | Winner | Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White | Joseph Lelyveld | Times Books |
| 1985 | Winner | Deadly Gambits | Strobe Talbott | Unknown |
| 1984 | Winner | The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House | Seymour M. Hersh | Summit Books |
| 1983 | Winner | The Fate of the Earth | Jonathan Schell | Knopf |
| 1982 | Winner | Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number | Jacobo Timerman | Vintage Books |
| 1981 | Winner | Cry of the People | Penny Lernoux | Penguin Books |
| 1980 | Winner | Sideshow - Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia | William Shawcross | Unknown |
| 1979 | Winner | Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice | Charles E. Silberman | Vintage Books |
| 1978 | Winner | A Rumor of War | Philip Caputo | Unknown |
| 1977 | Winner | Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality | Richard Kluger | Knopf |
| 1976 | Winner | The China Hands | E. J. Kahn, Jr. | Unknown |
| 1975 | Co-winner | Global Reach | Richard J. Barnet, Ronald E. Muller | Simon & Schuster |
| 1975 | Co-winner | Supership | Noel Mostert | Unknown |
| 1974 | Co-winner | A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait | Jervis Anderson | Harcourt Brace Jovanovich |
| 1974 | Co-winner | Special Award | Alexander Solzhenitsyn | Unknown |
| 1974 | Co-winner | The Imperial Presidency | Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. | Houghton Mifflin |
| 1973 | Winner | Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam | Frances FitzGerald | Little, Brown |
| 1972 | Winner | America Inc. | Morton Mintz, Jerry S. Cohen | Unknown |
| 1970 | Co-winner | Crime in America | Ramsey Clark | Orion |
| 1970 | Co-winner | The Ultimate Folly | Congressman Richard McCarthy | Unknown |
| 1969 | Winner | Not So Rich As You Think | George R. Stewart | Unknown |
| 1968 | Co-winner | Pax Americana | Ronald Steel | Viking |
| 1968 | Co-winner | Privacy and Freedom | Alan F. Westin | Atheneum |
| 1967 | Winner | The Airtight Cage | Joseph P. Lyford | Harper & Row |
| 1966 | Winner | Dark Ghetto | Kenneth B. Clark | HarperCollins |
| 1965 | Co-winner | Mississippi: The Closed Society | D r. James W. Silver | Unknown |
| 1965 | Co-winner | The Mythmakers | Bernard D. Nossiter | Unknown |
| 1964 | Winner | Anti-Intellectualism in American Life | Richard Hofstadter | Random House |
| 1963 | Winner | The Other America: Poverty in the United States | Michael Harrington | Macmillan |
| 1962 | Winner | Death and Life of Great American Cities | Jane Jacobs | Vintage Books |
| 1961 | Co-winner | Residence and Race | David McEntire | Unknown |
| 1961 | Co-winner | The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich | William L. Shirer | Simon & Schuster |
| 1960 | Winner | To Try Men's Souls | Harold M. Hyman | University of California Press |
| 1959 | Winner | The Affluent Society | John Kenneth Galbraith | Houghton Mifflin |
| 1958 | Winner | Neither Black Nor White | Wilma Dykeman, James Stokely | Unknown |
| 1957 | Winner | Individual Freedom and Government Restraints | Walter Gellhorn | Praeger |
| 1956 | Winner | National Security and Individual Freedom | John Lord O'Brien | Harvard University Press |
| 1955 | Winner | Freedom, Loyalty and Dissent | Henry Steele Commager | Oxford University Press |
| 1954 | Winner | Fire in the Ashes | Theodore H. White | William Sloane Associates |
| 1953 | Winner | The Herblock Book | Herbert Block | Beacon Press |
| 1952 | Winner | The Loyalty of Free Men | Alan Barth | Viking |
| 1950 | Winner | The Wall | John Hersey | Modern Library |